BYZANTINE MOSAIC

This photograph was taken from a mosaic on the ceiling of the Chora Church in Istanbul.

As we have seen, the medieval artist did not have a cohesive and geometrically correct framework for their art. And they did not care. What was important was to depict the essence of the subject matter. Call this Byzantine spacetime.

So in this mosaic, we can see the depiction of a building. And obviously it is geometrically incorrect. Not all of the walls are vertical. Not all of the geometric intersections are what we would call accurate.  It is not an isometric drawing and it is not a linear perspective.

When you look inside the arches, the artist allows us to see somewhat into the interior of the building. But of course these interior views would not be possible if this were geometrically accurate. Nevertheless, this multiview experience is interesting. We get the sense of the building form and we are given more information because of the artist’s subjective interpretation than if this image was geometrically correct.

Because the images that I am advocating are transparent, we also get more information than if the image is depicted typically with opaque sides. So I went ahead and made this transparent interpretation of the mosaic building.

As you can see, it is geometrically correct isometric.  Yet because of the transparency, it reveals more information than the multiview Byzantine mosaic. Of course I had to make some guesses to complete the form.  And you really can’t be sure regarding how the interior works or does not work.

Nevertheless, I believe that this provides a reasonably holistic understanding of what the Byzantine artist was depicting. What if they would have done a transparent mosaic. It also makes me wonder exactly what we are losing when we rely exclusively on accepted representational methods.